The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (Penguin English Library)

A previous reviewer gives a good summary of the textual history of Sidney's Old and New Arcadias; unfortunately, this text represents neither. The editor has made absolutely terrible decisions throughout, the most substantial of which is omitting the eclogues between each book (representing typically about 20-30 pages with each omission). He calls these eclogues "laboriously written and fantastical poetry" "[g]rowing like certain fanciful parasites upon forest trees"--despite the fact that these eclogues are present in both versions of the Arcadia, implying Sidney's valuation of them, and completing distorting the entire character of the work; the conflation of chivalric and pastoral modes (the latter of which the eclogues represent) is completely lost in this edition.In addition, the editor has chosen to omit "long episodes of no possible use to the book, which we think have been supplied by other hands than Sidney's". Besides the fact that distinguishing Sidney's work from others is a futile and even ridiculous exercise, these episodes "of no possible use" prove their worth when the reader of this edition finds him- or herself utterly confused by the development of the plot. The rebellion against Basilius in Book 2, for example, is compressed into a few short paragraphs--leaving out the events that explain why it occurred in the first place and how Zelmane (Pyrocles) quelled it. Moreover, it does a disservice to Sidney's interest in theories of political government, since the omission includes a substantial (and interesting) speech articulating the relationship between the sovereign and his subjects. In fact, one could argue (not that I want to go so far) that this editorial omission constitutes a populist agenda, since the omitted section casts a derogatory light on the stupid and ill-informed tradesmen who begin the revolt. On the level of plot, furthermore, this omission leaves the reader wondering what is so important about Clinias, who is subsequently treated with incommensurate seriousness; his actions in the rebellion and his tainted relation of it are severely compressed. It is ironic, therefore, that Zelmane asks Philoclea to explain the meaning of a poem handed to the former, insisting that the poem itself does not provide an explanation of the situations of the speakers represented therein. Well, in this edition, the poem doesn't even exist! The editor just goes straight from Zelmane receiving the poem to asking for an explanation! Now Philoclea REALLY needs to explain what's going on.All in all, this is an absolutely terrible edition that completely misrepresents Sidney's text. Taken as "Excerpts from The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," it might work; but even this reduces a multi-vocal, multivalent, multimodal work to an overly simplistic love story completely out of keeping with Sidney's other work. Sidney is one of the most influential poets of the period, and this generic expertise is thoroughly demonstrated in the numerous poems sprinkled throughout the Arcadia. But almost none of these are present in this edition. It has utterly no scholarly integrity.

A classic that supplied me with information for a book I am writing.

I wish I knew how to get a refund, and that I had read other reviews, which essentially say the same thing. This was scanned poorly and is too difficult to read. It does make me grateful, however, for services such as reCaptcha, wich help to figure out these errors.

The Arcadia is a magnificent book by Sir Philip Sidney and I was so happy to see it in Kindle format—until I looked at it. It was obviously scanned in automatically but never checked. All the worst aspects of scanning by photographing and converting the photo to text is found in the result. Many symbols appear in place of perfectly legible letters and footnotes and other back matter are plopped in the middle of sentences or even words. I tried to read it anyhow, making allowances for these problems, but the more I tried the more problems erupted. In short, some 80 percent of the text is totally unreadable. All that was needed was for some individual to sit down with the converted text and a copy of the text being scanned and proofread and correct the scanned results. A long job, to be sure, but a simple one for anyone who can read—and pleasurable work, to say the least. As it is, this Kindle Arcadia is unusable and so I dug out my old paperback edition of the book and forgot all about the Kindle version. Too bad Kindle doesn't examine scanned texts like this before foisting them on the public and ruining Kindle's reputation.

This is a horrible version! Deleted it and purchased the Penguin version instead. Some characters weren't even recognized so some words aren't even readable!

RESOLVED: The "New" Arcadia is better than the old--much better. And this is the edition of it you ought to read.

I needed this work for a class I am taking and as some other reviewers have stated it does have nonsensical and garbled wording. The issue is not that it is in "old English" as some have suggested. An example from one of the first pages, verbatim, "yonder did she put her foot into the boat, at thatjn&tantjjisJ.t were, dividing her he_aycnly_J>eauty between the earth and the _sea." Location 354 of the ebook. The whole thing is riddled with errors like this. I do not recommend purchasing this ebook.

not a readable version

Beware of the Amazon blurb as this isn't the 'Old' Arcadia (the first version that Sidney wrote), this is the so-called 'New' Arcadia, re-written, expanded and with many of the songs and poems taken out. However it's still my favourite version.A huge work that deliberately confounds genre this is both epic and romance, both 'novel' and poetry. The closest thing like it is Spenser's The Faerie Queen (although that is verse and this is prose) or the Hellenistic novels, Daphnis & Chloe or the Ethiopica.Whatever you want to call it though this is a marvellous read: full of shipwrecks and princesses, knights in disguise and love-lorn shepherds. Multiple narratives keep the story moving despite the Elizabethan love of rhetoric (and few do that better than Sidney!) and the sheer ability and love of story-telling come through admirably.Not always an easy read at first as you do need to get into Sidney's rhythm but a fantastic (in all senses of the word) one.** Edit **I've just noticed that Amazon have published this review under all the various editions of the Arcadia, so just to clarify: the Oxford World Classics (called the 'old' Arcadia) IS the old Arcadia; but the Penguin edition called the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, despite the Amazon blurb which describes it as the old Arcadia, is actually the 'new' composite version with the first three books revised by Sidney and then tacked onto the last two books of the 'old' Arcadia, with most of the eclogic poetry stripped out.

Leider ist diese E-Book-Ausgabe nicht zu gebrauchen. Ohne jegliche Korrektur durch die OCR gejagt. Beim ohnehin nicht ganz leicht zu verstehenden Englisch des 16. Jahrhunderts versteht man dan überhaupt nichts mehr. Dafür sind selbst 2 Euro zuviel. Die unwesentlich teurere digitale Sidney-Gesamtausgabe des Delphi-Verlags ist besser, aber leider durch den Umfang etwas unhandlich.

This book does help you when having to study Sir Philip's works. he is not my favorite author but I had to study him in university so this book was very helpful.